Lis Howell speaks out on the BBC & Dan Hind on her adversaries

OurKingdom contributor Lis Howell speaks out on making the BBC accountable as the men around her say all it needs is better leadership.

Lis Howell is rocking the airwaves. She is making some brilliant interventions on the radio in response the debate over the BBC in the wake of the reports on the Savile and Newsnight scandals. First on yesterday's Steve Hewlett's Media Show starting 9 minutes in, alongside John Lloyd and others and especially when, 24 minutes, she declares her work for openDemocracy and mentions the OurBeeb petition that incoming Director Generals should tell the public what they stand for. This morning she was up against Christopher Bland on the final 8.50am slot of the Today Programme and was wonderful, the BBC needs to be accountable, it's patronsing to think 'the public are not interested'. It's great to hear a sharp, experienced voice hit back so effectively against the traditional tones of British power.

There was a fascinating exchange yesterday morning on Radio 4′s Today programme.
Jim Naughtie, the show’s presenter, Sir Christopher Bland, the former
chairman of the BBC’s Board of Governors, and Lis Howell, the head of
broadcasting at City University, were discussing the most recent fallout
from the Savile scandal. You can hear the exchange in full here. The discussion begins seven minutes before the end of the programme.

Things began to get interesting when Howell said that she didn’t feel
that the BBC was doing enough to change its internal organization. She
pointed out that, while people trusted the BBC, they didn’t necessarily
trust the “complex, arcane, difficult management structure”. This
immediately got Naughtie going:

It’s all very well to talk about restructuring in general ways
and for you to say they’re not doing enough but if you tried to explain
to the public how you change the structure of management they would
quite rightly say “we are not interested”. They don’t care who’s the
deputy for this or that, they just want good programmes.

What’s immediately striking here is Naughtie’s confusion about what
“the structure of management” means. People work in institutions. The
structure of these institutions establishes the incentives and threats
that people face. They do not determine behaviour, but they influence
it. Structures favour some approaches, some styles, some guiding
principles. While the public might not much care “who’s the deputy for
this or that” at the BBC, they might still care about “the structure of
management”. Because, well, because this is more important.

This is a distinction that seems to escape Naughtie.

Howell then mentioned an initiative of openDemocracy, which had asked
that candidates for the job of Director-General publish their plans for
the organization, so that the public who pay for it could have an
opportunity to reflect on the BBC’s future development. Far from being
uninterested people quite liked the idea. Almost four thousand of us registered our support
in a few days. We didn’t hear about the idea from the BBC, of course.
They spend so much time showing us how seriously they take their
shortcomings that they are left with little time to publicise proposals
from elsewhere. At any event, Howell concluded that Naughtie was wrong –
“the public are interested, and if they aren’t, they should be”.

Politicising the BBC

A fair enough conclusion, you might have thought, given that the
public pay more than £3 billion a year to the BBC. Sir Christopher Bland
thought otherwise:

But your recipe would politicise the process and in my view would be disastrous.

We should pause for a minute here and think about personnel for a
second. Bland is a former Chairman of the Bow Group, a Conservative
think tank. He is also a former Conservative member of the GLC. He was
made Chairman of the Board of Governors by a Conservative Prime
Minister, John Major. John Major, neatly enough, is the current
President of the Bow Group. The current Chairman of the BBC Trust is
another Conservative politician, Lord Patten. He was appointed by
another Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron.

Now let’s think about structure. The BBC Trust appoints the
Director-General. This is the process that Bland fears will be
disastrously politicised by public participation.

“Democracy is in its Infancy”

Lis Howell made some interesting remarks in response to this:

Democracy is in its infancy … People are going to question more
and more about organisations like this and how they are managed and I am
afraid to say the BBC is in the front line … All the big stories
yesterday were about organisations like the Met, South Yorkshire Police,
UBS, all doing things without the public knowing. People are getting
more educated. They are getting more interested and they are going to
want to know more.

This drew Bland back into the fray:

But the public know absolutely more than enough about what’s
going on in the BBC and this programme is one of the things that helps
them to do that … The BBC is intensely self-critical.

(You have to love that “more than enough”)

Howell said that self-criticism was all very well, but perhaps some external criticism would be more useful.

Meanwhile Naughtie hadn’t stopped worrying away at the suggestion
that the public might want to know more about the institution they pay
for:

I am still struggling to think that people who are listening to
this programme who are interested in all kinds of things, polio
vaccination in Pakistan, the fact that people are wearing frilly jumpers
again … the idea that they would want more and more information about
who is going to be deputy head of this or that in the BBC, I think it’s
just balderdash.

Bland chipped in here with “I’m with the balderdash view”. (He and
Naughtie had already shared a dim-witted joke about something, so this
wasn’t entirely surprising. But it’s worth noting the unanimity.)

openDemocracy had suggested that candidates for Director-General set
out what they had in mind for the organisation. Whether or not people
are interested in “more information about who is going to be the deputy
head of this or that in the BBC”, this wasn’t what was being proposed.
Naughtie and Bland were dismissing as “balderdash” a figment of their
own imagination. Which is self-criticism of a sort.

As I say, I supported the openDemocracy proposal. I thought it would
be interesting to have a conversation about what the BBC is for. That
conversation still hasn’t happened. Instead we are invited to watch
while the BBC puts on an elaborate display of accountability. BBC
journalists pursue BBC executives and ask them penetrating questions
outside the offices they share. Reports are commissioned and received
with gratitude. Lord Patten promises “root and branch” reform. It’s all
terribly impressive.

But if you listen carefully you can hear Naughtie and Bland in the background, sharing a joke.

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